Born In America

The Back Roads Lead Urbanites To Hidden Treasures In Native Folk Art

July 10, 1988|By Victoria Lautman.

Imitation French chateaus and faux-fieldstone English manors whiz by on the drive to Jim and Beth Arient`s contemporary suburban home-an anomaly in their housing development. But it`s nothing compared to what waits inside. Every room, bathroom, nook, cranny and many of the closets are overflowing with the couple`s collection of contemporary American folk art.

Once a peripheral collecting interest, folk art has captured popular attention, cross-cutting boundaries such as age, background, occupation and level of art knowledge. The reasons hinge primarily on increasing exposure and an undervalued material, but the core of folk art`s allure is its appeal to almost everyone.

``When I started collecting 20 years ago, there were a limited number of people who made up the market and who collected folk art exclusively,`` says Frank Miele, director of Hirschl & Adler Folk gallery in New York, which opened in 1987 in direct response to the growing demand. ``Now the market is much broader, including people with all kinds of interests. Many of them weren`t even aware of the field before the early `70s, when the Whitney Museum of American Art presented an exhibition called `The Flowering of American Folk Art.` In fact, the interest in folk art, and the resulting expanded market, can probably be traced to that show.``

In Chicago, folk aficionados have surrounded themselves with the now-``

collectible`` work, having started out when there was little competition. None of them went to galleries for their purchases; even 10 years ago, few galleries would dare take on a folk carver or painter. These admirers sought out the artists by traveling to some often-peculiar locations.

The Arients` home is a testimony to their exotic journeys. Their pristine white kitchen is ringed with 24 grotesque ceramic face jugs by Georgia artist Lanier Meaders. Jim Arient, a dentist, says, ``In the `70s, we were interested in contemporary European art and had lots of prints, paintings and drawings all over the house. But after four or five years, the pieces we wanted became so expensive that we could only buy one work a year. It became really frustrating.``

Looking around their house, few examples of this contemporary art phase remain. Instead, on every surface, there`s a painting, carving or drawing by some untrained artist, whose work would be just as appropriate in an out-of-the-way log cabin as in this modern suburban house, home for the Arients and their 6-year-old son Matthew. There are dozens of works by Rev. Howard Finster, a visionary artist in his mid-70s who lives in Georgia. The dining room table hosts four wooden heads carved by S.L. Jones from West Virginia. Behind the couch, a group of wooden ``totem poles`` by local folk artist William Dawson stare out.

They were bitten by the collecting bug in 1977 when Beth, an inveterate library-browser, brought home a book called ``Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists,`` written by Herbert Waide Hemphill Jr. and Julia Weissman. Hemphill is a giant in the field of folk art collecting and writing. His book with Weissman is now out of print but is still regarded as the ``bible`` of the field by folk art collectors.

``It opened up a whole area we never knew existed,`` Jim Arient recalls.

``We asked, `What is this stuff?` (It) was being produced by Americans, in our country, while we were off buying work by Europeans! There were names of towns the artists lived in, and we wondered if we could visit them, talk to them and maybe even buy their work. We just started looking up their phone numbers in the library and calling them.``

A gutsy maneuver, and one that probably wouldn`t work today, considering the number of new players in the game. But at that time, ``It seemed that no one cared at all about these artists. We took trips to visit them, and they`d be so happy someone took an interest in their work. Most of them became friends, and we got to meet a few other people with similar interests who made the same trips we did. Now folks are tripping all over each other trying to get to these artists, looking to make big bucks off them. They figure they can buy $1,000 worth of folk art, take it back to Podunk and mark it way up. It`s become awfully commercial.``

Jim`s anxiety reflects the changes in the marketplace. ``Even five years ago we could visit the artists we loved and pick up a piece or two. Now so many of them have exclusive deals with various galleries that they won`t even talk to anyone.``

Discouraging as it sometimes is, Jim, Beth and Matthew still hop in the car four to six times a year and head to the South, the Eastern seaboard, Michigan-wherever they have artists to visit or new territory to explore. They filled every available space in their house years ago and began rotating pieces from closet to wall and back to closet. ``We`d need 10 houses to show everything,`` Beth says about the collection. Jim says, ``It`s like the blob; it`s constantly evolving.``